Google Wants To Be a Wireless Carrier

zacharye writes "Google has already conquered the software side of smartphones and now the technology giant is reportedly in talks to take over the air waves. A report on Thursday claims that Google has held talks with satellite television provider Dish Network regarding the possibility of a venture that would see Google launch its own cellular network and compete directly with the likes of Verizon and AT&T."

Comments

Shut up and take my money

[Anonymous Coward]

When the current crop of American wireless carriers look like a group of mustache-twirling Bond villains, it won't be hard for Google to come off as the better choice. At least they'll have an incentive to give you unlimited high speed data.

Too bad the coverage area will probably be tiny.

Re:Shut up and take my money

[somersault]

As long as it forces the other carriers to have a look at their rates, it's good. It probably won't affect me anytime soon seeing as I live in the UK (besides, my phone is a company phone anyway), but I'd like to see what kind of rates Google considers to be reasonable.

Re:Shut up and take my money

[BlueStrat]

When the current crop of American wireless carriers look like a group of mustache-twirling Bond villains, it won't be hard for Google to come off as the better choice. At least they'll have an incentive to give you unlimited high speed data.

Too bad the coverage area will probably be tiny.

You might get slightly better deals with Google, but the additional privacy/tracking data that Google (and the US government) will have on people...internet and phone/voice history, voice call recordings and internet browsing history, all that data from one convenient source...scares me.

I wish someone would write a credibly-strong voice/data encryption/scrambling smartphone app. They would probably have to develop/release/distribute it outside the US in a country unfriendly to the US, however, to avoid the long reach of the US government.

They wouldn't be happy that a large chunk of the domestic civilian signals surveillance data they planned to store in that mega-sized (and a mega-sized price tag) government data storage center they're building in Colorado became all but useless to them before they even cut the opening-day ribbon. That's one very large chunk of taxpayer money I wouldn't mind seeing turned into waste.

Strat

Re:Technical Question

[YoopDaDum]

The pricing is not so much driven by the technology than by what operators can charge. It's particularly true for text, where the margin is really really huge and unrelated to technology. But as it's a geek site let's go over the tech now ;) All 3 use slightly different mechanisms.

Short messages (SMS, or text) piggy back over the signaling protocol.

With GSM and WCDMA 3G (3GPP standards), voice and data share the same radio network. But on the network side there are separate core networks for voice (CS domain, for Circuit Switched) and data (PS domain, for Packet Switched). In the CDMA world there are actually separate radio networks for voice (CDMA 1x) and data (EVDO). This is why you can't do both voice and data at the same time on most CDMA phones: it would require 2 radios, which adds cost and complexity. Whereas with 2G/3G, both goes over the same radio network so both can operate concurrently with a single radio.

Starting with 4G, or LTE in practice, there is still a single radio network as before but now the core (EPC, Evolved Packet Core) is also unified and built over IP. Voice over LTE (VoLTE) is not common yet but it's basically VoIP built on IMS. All is unified, but voice is of course prioritized over best effort data using QoS both in the RAN (radio access network) and EPC.